So, it’s been a whole month since writing or contacting anyone, that’s definitely a record for me! Swaziland was absolutely worth unplugging from technology for and really diving deep into relationships with our squad mates and the ministry the Lord set up for us this month. After about a four hour bus/van/taxi ride from South Africa we crossed the border into Swaziland without any major issues, just a lot of hurrying up and then waiting and then hurrying up and then waiting, which seems to be the norm here in Africa anywhere we go. Once we crossed the border we started our ascent up into the mountains, all the way to the top of the mountains where El Shaddai, the orphanage that we worked at all month was located. I‘m extremely thankful and still in awe of how well those little tiny bus taxis can make it up the mountains out there, but they did and we made it safe and sound, along with the trailers filled with all of our huge 70L backpacks that they were dragging behind them. We saw a few kids out and about when we first got to El Shaddai but for the most part we all got settled and situated in the little houses and huts they had set up for us.
So, here we are at month 2 in Swaziland and we still haven’t needed our tents. I know, kind of a bummer because I was looking forward to camping, BUT due to the fact that we had all squad month this particular month it was fun to split up into these houses which were equipped with bunk beds and bathrooms, along with showers that if caught at the right time were either way too hot or freezing. As I write this while in Mozambique, I am super thankful that we still had toilets that flushed, which I will emphasize more on in another blog coming up pretty soon after this. I personally fell in love with community living with 40 something girls after a couple weeks. I mean I had my times where the noise of so many people in and out constantly got annoying and sharing my things became a little harder but there were always so many people giving and willing to share with each other that the community we had for the month was awesome. Minus the anonymous grizzly bear snorer, we all got along great and really loved the setup for the month. I truly felt blessed to have yet another bed for the month. We were also blessed with fresh running water every single day, fresh enough to drink and cook with. Speaking, of cooking, I just want to give a huge shout out to the kitchen team in Swaziland who cooked for the entire squad every single day, laboring hard in the kitchen making 108 peanut butter and jam sandwiches (2 per person), also accommodating the many on the squad who have allergies and gluten issues.
So many have been wondering about the food we ate this past month and to be honest we ate pretty well. One of my awesome squad mates, John Singson, has such a passion for cooking and is amazing at it so he, along with the kitchen team for the squad, cooked breakfast, lunch, and dinner for all 54 of us daily this past month. Lots and lots of peanut butter and jam sandwiches for lunches, muesli with yogurt and milk for breakfast, and they got super creative with dinners. Some nights for dinner we would have sausage gravy and biscuits, which made my heart super happy as I felt a little piece of Oklahoma had visited Swaziland. There was spaghetti with vegetables, lots of stews and soups, we had hamburgers and cole slaw with mashed potatoes the same night we had a two stepping lesson along with some good country music, and of course any meals that John Singson prepared himself he always had his extremely too hot to even be hot sauce-sauce readily available for anyone of us who were feeling brave enough to give it a try. I would have to say the only downside to having our own squad cook for us is that we didn’t really get a chance to eat too many authentic Swazi foods.
While we had a team cooking for us as a squad, they also divided everyone up into different ministry teams and jobs and my job for the whole month just so happened to be in a whole separate kitchen cooking for the kids in the orphanage. We had teams working on the dirt roads, some building fences, people playing with the kids, some working in the pig pens, we had a painting team, and a team in the garden, as well as my team in the kitchen. I had an excitement in my spirit about cooking and being in a kitchen before we even left for Swaziland so when I got the opportunity to cook for the kids I was all over it! My first time in the kitchen was actually a really good day. Charmain, the owner and founder of El Shaddai had come to the kitchen to show us around and how things were done and I ended up getting to have a pretty deep conversation with her over a pot of boiling soya mince soup, diced onions, carrots, potatoes, peppers, and seasonings. She shared her story of how the Lord called her to this particular mountaintop and that she felt overwhelmed because it seemed like such a big task but the Lord had told her that He would bring the workers, which in this very moment was me and my team. I absolutely loved getting to stand there working and just really enjoying cooking for the kids and then hearing what the Lord had told her. Her obedience in stepping out and creating El Shaddai has not only directly impacted my life but so many others who have had the opportunity to come and serve alongside them.
So, my ministry for the month was cooking in the kitchen alongside the Aunties, the older ladies native to Swaziland who work with the kids, do their laundry, and cook for them when there isn’t a team present. Some days ministry looked like coming into the kitchen and asking the aunties what was on the menu to cook and due to a language barrier and no way of contacting Charmain when she was in town, we would just put together the things they did have in the kitchen to make a soup or gravy to go along with their rice or porridge. I learned you can make a lot of creative and yummy things with just onions, carrots, potatoes, peppers, spinach (lots and lots and lots and lots of spinach), and I’m also now a certified professional onion chopper. (Mom, you would be super proud, I used your onion chopping trick you showed me a long time ago all month long and even taught it to the others.) A lot of the mornings were spent going to their garden and picking fresh spinach and other vegetables to cook with. Going to the garden and picking the vegetables and walking through the process of washing them pretty good and getting them ready to cook with was tiring but it made cooking a lot more fun for me. No Wal-Mart, or Pick-n-Pay here in Africa, no market close by, just the garden on the mountaintop. We had a team from our squad that worked in the garden all month long so seeing the fruits, or in my case vegetables, from someone else’s labor really put it into perspective for me how important and vital gardening and agriculture are in countries like Swaziland. We fed around 80 people all together daily, 60 something were kids and the rest were the aunties. So yeah, I guess you could say that ministry for me this month looked like cutting lots and lots of onions, shedding a few tears, washing tons of spinach, and making some pretty interesting soups and gravies for the kiddos and aunties. Days in the kitchen went by fast. We would play worship music and have some jam sessions singing songs that we learned in South Africa to the aunties and then they would sing a Swazi song back to us. Though we couldn’t really hold full conversations with each other due to the language barrier we had so much fun and learned to love each other and work alongside each other without words. Aunty Julie, one of the main aunties, would bring in these little balls of fried dough called “fat cakes” (SO GOOD, especially when you’ve had pb&j’s every day for 3 weeks straight), and she sold them for 1 Rand a piece. I bought them every chance I had and made it a thing to smile big and give her a huge hug when she would walk in the door with the bucket full of fat cakes. She would laugh and get just as excited as I did when she came to the kitchen and it became this unspoken way of bonding I guess, laughing and feeling pure joy over something as small as fat cakes and being in each other’s presence. None of the aunties had much of anything to their name but they all worked so eagerly with their hands every day, some walking an hour and half from home to work from the mountains across the valley, and persevering with strength and joy each day never showing a sign of being tired. It blessed me to just watch how hard and eagerly they worked. I learned to love them and help them without hurting them by helping too much. This was their life and livelihood and I began to realize how blessed I was to be able to step into their world even if for just one month.
Along with working in the kitchen, I was also given a “buddy” for the month. My buddy was the most beautiful, inside and out, 19 year old girl named Nolwazi Dlamini. I won’t lie, when I found out my buddy was 19 years old I was kind of intimidated. I’ve been ministering to the little ones for the past couple of years and previous month so having to actually have deep conversations with a young adult seemed like a challenge.
The first day I got to hang out with Nolwazi I was worried I wouldn’t have much to say but we ended up connecting pretty quickly. I started to realize how many “buddies” these kids get, some have had 50 something buddies while some like Nolwazi have only had about 7 buddies. Each time a team comes to El Shaddai they assign buddies and those that have been at the orphanage for a long time have seen buddies come and go. Nolwazi has been at El Shaddai since she was 9 years old. Although Nolwazi has been at the orphanage the longest she doesn’t get buddies very often because Charmain’s daughter, who is also 26 years old like me, is like her permanent mentor and lives there on the mountaintop with them. It was challenging getting to know Nolwazi and feeling like I was making any kind of impact in her life because I know she’s seen people come and go so often, but the more I prayed for her the more the Lord showed me to just love her where she was at and not to preach to her or try and change anything about her. I was there to be a friend and love her like Jesus more than anything else. I learned fast that she loved to cook and that she was good at it. She shared with me her dreams of going to college one day and wanting to work in the hotel industry and manage a restaurant and hotel of her own. She shared her frustrations that the funds it would take to take the tests needed to go to college abroad is really the only thing holding her back at this point. I got to cook alongside her and watch her amazing knife skills that easily put mine to shame while we listened to Lauren Daigle’s “How Can it Be” song over and over again because she loved it so much. She actually had me write out the lyrics for her so she could learn to sing it.
Speaking of songs and singing, Nolwazi has the voice of an angel, but seriously though. She failed to tell me she could sing until the first Sunday we got to go to church and she was sitting a few rows in front of me and the most beautiful angelic voice began to sing “Hallelujah”. My teammate Kristen turned around and pointed at her and said, “It’s your buddy Kacy”. I was in tears before I even knew it was Nolwazi singing but it took my heart even deeper into the Lord’s presence when I found out it was her. For a month now the Lord has been encouraging me to sing and share my testimony and all that the he’s done in my life. There’s only one word that comes to mind when I think of all that God has brought me through and delivered me from and it’s, “Hallelujah”. The fact that the Lord chose Nolwazi to be my buddy was another one of his sweet reminders to continue to sing and share and praise him with the biggest “HALLELUJAH” I possibly can.
Why would the Lord be so obvious about reminding me to share my testimony? Being vulnerable with my squad mates throughout the month was a struggle for me. I’ve never had to fight as much spiritually in prayer as I did while in Swaziland. Remembering that we have an enemy out there that’s there to steal, kill, and destroy us in any way possible wasn’t very hard. He directly attacked my identity as a redeemed child of God in every way he possibly could through lies and deception. It seemed to be a common theme for him last month as the whole squad experienced a spiritual attack in the area of identity. We held overnight prayer vigils, worshipped together as a squad pretty often, and continued to fight in the spirit through sharing our testimonies with one another. Someone once told me that “testimony” means “to release again”, and that when we share our testimony it allows the Lord to release the same faith that he released in our lives into the lives of those around us. I prayed and basically told the Lord that if he wanted me to share my full testimony that he would have to bring those people into my path and give me lots and lots of courage, and he was definitely quick and faithful to answer my stubborn prayer. Each time I shared I felt a newer level of freedom and I felt the chains the enemy had been trying to reattach fall. Every time I would go to worship after sharing my testimony, my “Hallelujah” would get louder and louder coming from my spirit. I never got the chance to sing with Nolwazi but because of the gift the Lord has given her I was encouraged at just the right time to release the song the Lord has written with my life, whether it be through spontaneous “HALLELUJAH’S” during worship or through sharing my testimony with anyone who is willing to listen.
The month in Swaziland was a hard month, spiritually speaking. There were a lot of attacks but with those came a lot of victories because of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I would find myself hiking down the side of the mountain pretty often to find alone time with Jesus and to pray. I found this one particular rock that I would hike to every day and sit on to worship and pray out loud. On my hike back up, I realized one day that though he’s moved a lot of mountains in my life already I’m not done climbing. There are many more mountains ahead that he’s going to ask me to climb whether for myself or for others and I have to be obedient and learn to stand firm in my faith and be of good courage when the climb gets rough and rocky on the way up.
I’ve made a video of footage from the month at El Shaddai. Nolwazi is the young girl singing at the end. There’s quite a bit more I’d like to share with all of you but I just realized I’m now at 8 pages. OOPS! I’m already working on another blog for Swaziland and then one more for our first week here in Mozambique. I cannot tell you all enough and thank you enough for warring in the spirit through prayer for me and my team and squad. There were days when I was tired, discouraged, and weak feeling but the Lord was always faithful to encourage and refresh me physically, spiritually, and emotionally. Thank you for praying. He is answering. I love you all so very much and I can’t wait for you to watch the video.
Standing firm in the faith,
Kacy
“Sing, barren woman, you who never bore a child; burst into song, shout for joy, you who were never in labor; because more are the children of the desolate woman than of her who has a husband,” says the Lord. Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your tent curtains wide, do not hold back; lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes. For you will spread out to the right and to the left; your descendants will dispossess nations and settle in their desolate cities. Do not be afraid; you will not be put to shame. Do not fear disgrace; you will not be humiliated. You will forget the shame of your youth and remember no more the reproach of your widowhood. For your maker is your husband—the Lord Almighty is his name—the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer; he is called the God of all the earth.” (Isaiah 54:1-5)
